For better or worse, companies must engage with clients. Whether those are direct consumers or B2B clients, each client is unique, which means they come with their unique set of challenges. Some clients can quickly become more like partners in business, sharing similar goals, values and approaches to achieving goals together.

Others don’t act quite the same way. Unfortunately, you may come in contact with tricky, tough or even obnoxious clients who seem to think the old maxim – “the customers is always right” – gives them the freedom to make your life as difficult as possible.

You know the type? Sure you do. Luckily, there are ways to deal with these clients to keep your business safe and your days less stressful. Below is a guide on how to identify and deal with obnoxious clients.

Spot the warning signs

Some trouble clients seem to appear out of nowhere – you’ve had great interactions, happily signed contracts together and everyone appears to be on the same page. Then the unrest begins.

The client is yelling on the phone, making demands and reacting disproportionately to problems that could be solved in more effective and less stressful ways. Keep an eye out for these red flags before you enter a business agreement with a client:

They want to be persuaded

“Why should we work with you at all?” Clients who begin relationships on such a tough note want you to prove yourself right away. Businesses should of course give a great pitch to bring in new clients, but if you feel like you have no power and that you’re already working to prove yourself before you begin services, that’s a red flag.

Business becomes personal

“Did you not get anything out of our previous conversations? Why can’t you understand what we want?” When you hear these phrases, or others that feel like an attack against your personal abilities, it’s time to set some boundaries to protect yourself and your staff. Outcomes aren’t always perfect and you can’t read minds. That doesn’t mean a client gets to attack you.

They’re never happy

“This just isn’t what we’re looking for.” If you’re working on third, fourth or fifth attempts to get a project right, the onus probably isn’t entirely on you. You’ve had multiple discussions on the scope and direction of the project – if they’re not happy after receiving high levels of service, they’re the ones who aren’t being clear.

Of course, many red flags don’t appear until after you’ve signed the contract and entered a business agreement with one another. Once you spot these warning signs, however, don’t ignore them. You must take certain precautions to keep you and your staff safe.

Protect staff

Just because a client is paying you doesn’t mean they get to abuse you. The same is true of everyone in a company, from interns to administrative assistants all the way up to executives.

If you have a bad phone call with a client during which you’ve been exposed to yelling, an aggressive tone, unrealistic expectations or outright blame for a mutual misunderstanding, it’s time to talk about it with others in your company.

Agencies have a responsibility to their staff first, followed by clients. As such, business leaders should include training on communicating with clients as well as how to bring an issue to their supervisor.

As part of this training and evaluation once a client has become a troublesome one, gather internally to address where the behaviour is coming from. Is the negative attitude or obnoxious tone coming from an individual, seemingly out of the blue, or is it a team or company-wide culture issue? If it’s the former, the situation may be workable. If it’s the latter, it’s time to consider whether such a stressful partnership is worth it.

Furthermore, companies need to take this issue very seriously, and evaluate the level of disrespect employees are experiencing. No level of aggression or insults is okay, but if a client’s bad behaviour constitutes harassment or discrimination, or shows possibilities of escalating to that level, the situation simply cannot go on.

Take written notes during these phone calls to document any negative speech and keep internal communication free to encourage discussion. If you’re not on these phone calls or in these meetings, ask employees to give you updates on the situation. If possible, monitor the situation up close, and sit in on these calls to gauge the scope of the matter yourself.

Revisit expectations

Projects are going wrong at every turn, you’re working on multiple drafts for small endeavours and clients are now demanding calls twice a week. You’re not wrong to be stressed – the situation is going from bad to worse, and now is the time to revisit client expectations.

Have a frank discussion with your client to talk about how their actions are affecting the project at hand. Deadlines may be coming and going as clients demand perfection, which can mean delayed payments on your end.

Bad clients are often unafraid to push your personal and professional boundaries, so now’s the time to bring up any contractual agreements they may be trying to push. Make it clear that you’re trying to work together in the best way possible, and that both parties need to try to make the road forward a more pleasant and efficient one.

Consider the future relationship

What is the client costing you, in both tangible and intangible terms? You thought the client would require 10 hours of dedicated work per week to complete the scope of the project – now it’s more like 20. That’s money out the door.

Distress can also cost you – if you have a roster of bad clients, don’t expect your best staff members to stick around for long. And if you’re working alone, don’t expect to enjoy your job.

If you don’t have this set up already, going forward make sure to include explicit get-out language in contracts, as well as a code of conduct agreements and limits on the number of drafts clients can expect from you and your company.

Business is tough enough on its own, you don’t need to add on obnoxious clients, too. It’s in your interest, and your company’s interest, to seek out the kind of clients that make your day better, not worse.

Designers are never satisfied. I think this might be true of all designers (being critical of your own work is something design education teaches us), but it is especially true of product designers. We are always looking to improve — our work, our products, our teams, and ourselves. Perhaps this is why so many product designers I know (myself included) are eager to learn more about product management, or become product managers themselves.

At around 10 years into my career as a designer, I had the opportunity to transition into product management at a Fortune 100 healthcare company. I found the experience extremely valuable. I took the opportunity because I wanted to grow myself as a leader, but along the way I realised that in order to build successful products, product designers must understand the work of product management (and vice versa).

What I found most interesting about the role of product management is the type of problem-solving the role requires. As a designer, my problem to solve is understanding, designing, and refining the user experience. As a product manager, my problem took a different shape — balancing business needs, stakeholder concerns, and timeline pressures. It’s a strategy puzzle, where you’re forced to make tough trade-offs to get the best product possible out the door.

If you’re interested in learning more about product management, or looking to make the transition yourself, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned over the past several years.

Design strengths

I found that several qualities I’d developed as a product designer were very beneficial to me as a product manager.

User obsession

Designers know that you have to understand your users. They always question business goals to make sure they align with some real user value. Designers know that we cannot change customer behaviour through fancy animations and gamification, but that getting to the root of a customer problem, and solving it, will build a loyal brand advocate.

Commitment to quality

Designers have a high threshold for quality. A background in design gives you the ability to understand what you’re giving up if you forgo design enhancements, and if it’s likely to impact the user experience. Product managers have to understand tradeoffs, and having some formal training in design helps you understand the tradeoffs you’re making on the experience.

Research

Design educators emphasise the problem-solving aspect of design, in an effort to provide their students with a solid foundation for whatever kind of work may come their way. A designer’s natural tendency to ask “Why”, and to do research, is a great asset as a product manager.

Empathy

Product managers don’t get anything done without the participation of others. To generate consensus and a shared vision, product managers must seek out other’s perspectives and understand their needs. A skill that can be borrowed from design to help with consensus-building is the designers’ focus on empathy.

While these strengths were a huge boon to me as a product manager, I quickly learned that many of my design skills were no longer part of my role, and that collaboration with product designers is essential to successful product management.

Design pitfalls

Here are some things to watch out for if you’re moving from product design into product management.

Focusing too much on design

You have designers for this. If you try to micromanage the design, or just do it yourself, you’ll stifle their creativity at best. At worst, you’ll make an enemy and spend the rest of your time together arguing about things like what colour the footer should be. If you are doing the job of design, then it’s likely that you’re not looking after the product management side of things as you should.

Letting design become a satellite

There’s a natural overlap between design and product, and managing that overlap can sometimes be a delicate dance. Erring on the side of siloing is just as detrimental as micromanaging design. You’ll do your teammates and your product — and ultimately, your users — a disservice if you’re so wary of encroaching on design territory that you don’t collaborate with them at all. If you’re worried about striking the right balance with your design team, tell them so up front. Work together to find a collaboration style that brings out the best in the team.

Not visualising your thoughts

While avoiding high fidelity is wise, so you don’t unintentionally end up doing the design yourself, you’ll have to visualise your thinking somehow. If you don’t, I guarantee what you’re imagining, and the goal you’re trying to achieve, will get lost in translation. I stick to white boarding, because it communicates what I’m thinking about without seeming permanent.

Being scared of the tech

While a PM may never sit down at the keyboard and write the code or deliver a story, it is important to invest in understanding the tech side of things. Especially so for PMs coming through design, as they probably didn’t take many coding or statistics classes. Even if you have the most amazing engineers, you can’t understand the tradeoffs you’re making without understanding the tech.

Letting your stakeholders walk all over you

One of the most important skills I had to develop when I became a PM was managing the business side of things. Product management requires a great deal of diplomacy, and a fair bit of politics. Just because a stakeholder asks for something, it doesn’t mean it’s right for the product. As a former designer, I had a tendency to acquiesce to stakeholders, assuming they knew better. As I grew more confident, I was able to assess when to say yes, when to say no, and when to defer responding one or another at all, depending on what was best for my product — and the product team — at the time.

Collaborating with design

A strong and efficient product management and product design team can produce fantastic products. If design and product management don’t have a healthy relationship, it will show — in shoddy quality, incoherent product, or an unhappy product team.

There are a few areas where product and design work particularly well together, and where their collaboration can accelerate the team’s progress most.

Build a research plan

User research and usability testing is an activity best shared by product management and design. Because the results will meaningfully impact the direction of the product and the look and feel of individual features, the best research plans are the result of close collaboration between product managers and designers.

As a product manager, I would begin by working with the product designers to create a research script. We would begin by discussing what we’d like to learn that week. Then we would choose our methods — prototype testing, actual software testing, card sorting, interviewing, etc. Once the goals and methods are squared away, we would get into what specific questions or tasks will be most effective. Usually after that first run, the product designers refine the details, then share it with product management for any last-minute feedback on the final draft before going into research.

Stakeholder interviews

When interviewing stakeholders, product managers have a tendency to either sell the product, or promise to put things on the roadmap. Designers are a step removed from the stakeholder, so having them present in these sessions can bring a helpful sanity check when the time comes to incorporate feedback into the backlog. Generally speaking, I still lead the session, though I do send my stakeholder interview script over to the design team for feedback beforehand, and I synthesise with them afterwards to get their perspective.

User science

Qualitative and quantitative data go hand in hand. Many product managers tend to favour analytics, while designers are passionate about user research. By working together to gather this data and understand how it all plays together, you’ll deepen your understanding of user needs and behaviours. This is a great opportunity to bring in engineering as well, as they often have ideas of analytics or telemetry to implement that others may not think of.

User story writing

User stories are one of the key tools in translating an imagined product into real, working software. They’re also an opportunity for much confusion and disagreement between product management and product design. Creating a good cadence for collaborating on user stories is essential.

If you’re the product manager, try adding a new feature to the backlog by writing out the goal portion of the story only (As a, I want to, So that), without any acceptance criteria. Get a few stories queued up this way, then take some time to talk through the stories with the designers. If necessary, do some whiteboard sketching about how you all think the story will be implemented, and bounce ideas back and forth. Then let the designers sit with things a while, and once they have a design they feel good about, come back together to discuss. Ultimately, you’ll end up with well thought-out stories, and your engineers will thank you for not throwing in last-minute edge cases during estimation.

User story acceptance

For units of development that have a user interface, I always tap a designer on the shoulder for a second opinion. While I’m looking for functionality, value, and meeting the acceptance criteria, a designer is often more focused on visual details. If something small is missed, it’s much more likely to get fixed before acceptance than to get prioritised on its own later. Ask your designers for a visual check of any stories involving high-fidelity UI work. Hell, ask them to check every story for acceptance! A second pair of eyes never hurt anything, no matter how detail-oriented you are.

Marketing

Whether you’re working with a separate marketing team or handling this yourself, a designer is a key asset when coming up with a marketing plan. The marketing of your product is part of the experience. If there’s a disconnect between how your product shows up in the marketplace and how users experience it once they’ve tried it out, there will be cognitive dissonance and it will hurt your product. Designers are focused on finding these inconsistencies and reconciling them.

Align on goals

Every good product has goals. Write yours down, make them clear and measurable, and post them in a place where the whole team can see. Any time you find the team is in conflict about the solution, refer back to the goals. Often it becomes clear that one direction more clearly aligns to the goals, and if the whole team agrees on the goals, then the conflict isn’t about whose idea is better, but whatever solution gets the team to the goal.

Making the transition

If you’re a designer thinking you’d like to make the transition into product management yourself, there are ways to set yourself up for success.

Find a team that is collaborative

If you can work regularly with your product manager, you’ll learn a lot just by observing what they do. It will also give you a chance to see all the aspects of product management, and how it works at your company. The role varies a lot from company to company, so just reading the books and articles won’t give you a true sense of what the job is like.

Read books about product management

Get an understanding of the theory. Three books that are pretty commonly recommended as good places to start are The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Inspired by Marty Cagan, and Sprint by Jake Knapp.

Find a mentor

Identifying someone who has skills you’d like to learn and setting a goal to learn from them will help you formalise your path, and give you someone impartial to bounce ideas off and work through struggles with.

Learn the business

Pay attention in those stakeholder meetings! If you’re not invited to them, ask to be included! You don’t even have to speak up. Just hearing the conversations that happen with stakeholders and product sponsors will teach you a lot about the different perspective PMs bring to the work.

Get out there

Attend conferences, meetups, and workshops. Our industry changes so rapidly that we have to stay on top of our professional development, and often the latest techniques and frameworks are shared at conferences or meetups.

Ask for feedback

Find people you trust to be honest, and explicitly ask them to tell you how you’re doing. Both good and bad! It may take a while to form a relationship where others feel comfortable being candid this way, but it’s hugely worthwhile to have someone check in with on how you’re doing. I recommend having a few folks you can ask on the fly. Take what they say openly — don’t defend or react. You are welcome to disagree with feedback you’ve asked for, but it’s bad form to start an argument about it. And be prepared to give them feedback in return.

Whether you decide to transition into a product management role or not, understanding the job, and how product managers think, will make you a better designer, and help you get the best version of your work out into the world.

As their “technical contact”, your clients might assume that it’s your responsibility to keep their sites secure and/or to fix any security issue that might arise.

Whether it is or not, educating your clients (and potential clients) about plugin security can save you time and headaches, while also keeping them happy and their businesses (and yours) safe and thriving.

So in this post we’ll show you how to talk to your clients about WordPress plugin security to ensure you both have peace of mind. Or, better yet, why not share this article with them?

Ready? Let’s get started.

Only use the necessary plugins

The more WordPress plugins you install, the more vulnerable your website is to an attack. Since you’re running more code, your odds to having a security vulnerability exploited go up.

In addition, you’re so busy growing your business that you likely don’t have time to keep updated on or respond quickly to plugin vulnerability reports.

So whenever you find an interesting new plugin, take a moment and ask yourself if you really need it before you install it.

Always get your plugins from a trusted source

It’s tempting to look for free plugins online. The problem is that if they’re not from a reputable site, they might contain malware that can compromise your site’s security.

If possible, try to limit your plugin downloads to the official WordPress.org plugin directory.

If you find a great plugin on another site, take a few moments to review it to ensure it’s a reputable and trustworthy source before downloading and installing the plugin on your website.

Here are a few key things to look at to determine whether the site can be trusted.

The site looks professionally designed

There’s a company name in the header as well as in the footer

The plugin has a clear, grammatically correct description

The terms of service and a privacy policy are readily available

Contact information like physical address, email address and phone number is visible. If there’s no contact information anywhere, don’t trust it

It uses an SSL certificate that shows visitors the site is secure

If you run a search on Google for that website name alongside one of the keywords “malware”, “hacked” or “exploit”, none of the results reveal reports of malicious activity.

Choose reputable plugins

It’s not only the source that you need to pay attention to, but also the actual plugin.

If you go to the WordPress.org plugin directory, you’ll notice that many plugins have detailed descriptions as well as ratings and reviews.

Now, with the increasing number of attacks and vulnerabilities, anyone, including you, can be a victim of these breaches. In fact, the easiest target for hackers is site owners who don’t keep their plugins up to date.

That’s why it’s of utmost importance to update your plugins to the latest version as soon as possible, particularly if it includes a security fix. This is critical to avoid being compromised by hackers.

Delete plugins you don’t use

If you have plugins you no longer use, delete them. Removing them reduces your risk since hackers cannot exploit code you don’t have on your website.

Your turn

These are the most important things that we believe your clients should know about WordPress plugin security in order to keep their websites safe.

Animation on the web has come a long way. At first we used Flash to create websites, which were all fun and interactive, then we got to fancy JavaScript libraries, and now the web platform offers us a selection of native animation tools. But with all the new choices it gets harder to decide which ones to use, so we’re going to dive deeper into native animation options currently available and what the differences are.

CSS animations and transitions

The simplest and most popular option is CSS animation and transitions. With its declarative nature CSS offers a basic way to add some animations to elements directly in your CSS.

CSS transitions are a good use case for animation, when you want to go from one state A to another state B. Here is a little example of a menu animation:

Whenever the menu on the left is hovered, its transform property is set to transform: translate(0%);. When it’s not hovered, it’s set to transform: translateX(-90%);. Then on the idle not-hovered state we’re setting a transition on our transform property transition: transform 0.45s cubic-bezier(0.39, 0.575, 0.565, 1);. So our menu is going from state 90% to the left to 0% in the center.

CSS animations on the other hand allow us to create animations with more complex animation states. So if you want to animate from State A to State B to State C to State D, etc. These kind of animations are perfect for simple loading animations. Here’s another little example:

On our element that we want to be animated we define the animation to load animation: pulse both 1.2s infinite linear;. This tells the animation to run with a speed of 1.2s, infinitely, a linear easing function and an fill-mode of both. If you’re not familiar with the syntax, take a look at Animations in CSS on cssreference.io and explore what all the keywords mean. The actual definition of our animation happens with the @keyframes pulse definition. Essentially, we have three states in our animation:

Scaled to almost zero and not visible opacity: 0. With the ease-out-sine timing function animation-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.39, 0.575, 0.565, 1) we’re telling the animation to come in slowly and then speed up until we reach the next state.

Scaled to its actual size and visible with a timing function of linear to make it slower in the middle of the animation.

Scaled up to 1.4 times its size and fading to not visible with an ease-in-sine function to make it disappear slowly and then speeding up to the end of the animation.

A great bonus for CSS transitions and animations are that they can run independently from your JavaScript and are able to be hardware accelerated over your GPU. Good use cases for both are: Simple animations with up to three different stages, loading spinners, and animations triggered on :hover and :focus. However, if you want to create more complex animations that have lots of different stages, this is fairly hard to do in CSS, since you would need to write a lot of CSS code that’s perfectly timed together.

The Web Animations API

This is where the Web Animations API (short WAAPI) comes in, a more powerful, native alternative to CSS animation. Similar to CSS animations the WAAPI can run animations on the compositor thread, so independently from your JavaScript, and it can also hardware accelerate animations over the GPU. Furthermore, it gives you controls and callback to handle your animations after they were created. Let’s take a look at an example:

We have a counter that’s counting down from 10, and we want to speed up the animation the closer the countdown gets to 0. To create animations with the Web Animations API, we first have to get an element we want to animate with document.querySelector, then we need to call the .animate() function on this element. This returns an animation object with certain controls and callbacks, which we’re going to use later. To create an animation, the .animate function takes the following parameters:

A keyframes array or object with the different stages of the animation.

A timings object with the different timing options on how fast and how often the animation should run.

In the example below we have two keyframes: from visible and scaled to 60% to half visible and scaled to its full size. For the timing we defined it to run half a second with a linear easing, no delay and 100 iterations. Again these keywords are almost the same keywords we use in CSS animations.

To speed up the animation, we make use of the control on our countdownAnimation object, which is returned by the .animate function in the code snippet above. We’re setting an interval that’s counting down our numbers, and as long as our number is bigger than 0, we’re increasing our countdownAnimation.playbackRate up to a maximum of 6. If our counter is finished, we’re calling the countdownAnimation.finish() control function to stop our animation and clear the interval.

Since we’re defining our animations in JavaScript, we get a lot more control and can create more complex and interactive animations. If we had done the following example in CSS, we would have needed multiple elements, which would have needed to be timed perfectly together. Doing it with the WAAPI makes the code a lot more readable. The only downside to the WAAPI at the moment is the missing full browser support . If we take a look at the Can I Use numbers, Firefox, Chrome and Safari are getting good support, but Edge hasn’t yet implemented the API, so it’s going to take a little bit longer until your animations run everywhere. The general advice for browser support with the Web Animations API is to fall back to no animations if the browser doesn’t support them. There is a polyfill, if you really need full browser support, but not everyone recommends using it.

JavaScript and CSS Variables

The third popular option for web animation are CSS Variables in combination with JavaScript. Many developers love this approach to animation, because it allows you to define your complex calculations in JavaScript. You then specify which element gets animated and which of its CSS properties is changed in CSS. JavaScript in combination with CSS Variables is especially great for creating reactive animations.

Since CSS Variables are inherited by their parent, this allows us to define a variable on a parent element and make use of this variable in all child elements. This is great because we don’t need excessive DOM manipulation and only define the variable on the parent once.

First we need to get the element we want to set our variable on. This will be the parent element, with all the child elements that we want to animate inside. We’re defining a raf variable to be able to call a function for continuous animation optimisation called requestAnimationFrame.

const parent = document.querySelector('#app');
let raf;

Then we’re adding a mousemove listener on our document. So whenever the mouse is moved in our document, a new event is fired. When that event is fired, we’re calling our update function with the requestAnimationFrame function that’s provided by the browser. Essentially, this tells the browser that we’re updating an animation and that the provided function should be called before the browser performs the next repaint. The requestAnimationFrame is widely used for improved performance on continuous animation updates.

Then we’re defining our actual update function. Here we’re calculating our e.clientX pixel value in proportion to the window width. The calculation returns an x value of -1 when the mouse is on the left hand side of the document, a value of 0 when it’s in the centre and a value of 1, when it’s on the right.

Finally we’re setting our variable on our parent element with the setProperty('--x', x ) function. In the end we’re setting our raf function to null, to be able to call requestAnimationFrame again.

This is all the JavaScript we need for our reactive animations, now let’s have a look at the CSS. To be able to animate one of the child elements, we’re going to change their transform and opacity properties. For the first item we’re changing the rotation according to mouse position. The mouse value is already set on the parent #app element via JavaScript and accessible via CSS over the var(—x) selector. Since our X Value is between -1 and 1, depending on where the mouse currently is at, we need to multiply this value with degrees. So with rotate(calc(var(--x) * 360deg)) we’re rotating our element 360 degrees clockwise or anticlockwise depending on if you’re moving your mouse left or right. Similar calculations are made with the other elements. Since we set X to a sensible value, it’s easy to multiply it with different units like px or deg or %, whatever you need for your transformation.

.item-one {
transform: rotate(calc(var(--x) * 360deg));
}

Using CSS Variables this way allows us to avoid excessive DOM Manipulation, because we only need to set the variable on the parent once, thus making it accessible to all child elements.

They also allow us to animate different transform properties independently. So for example rotating an element independently from its translation, by animating a rotation variable. Using JavaScript to do calculations allows us to use more complex easings, like a bouncing easing or react to DOM events. Generally, CSS Variables and JavaScript go really well together.

JavaScript animations

I’m not going to dive deep into JavaScript animation, because there are a lot of JavaScript libraries for all the different animation needs.

Have a look at Web-animation toolkit and choose the right library for what you want to animate. Generally, libraries are a great choice if you want to animate SVG, since there are still a lot of browser inconsistencies if you do more complex SVG animation natively. There are also amazing libraries like three.js for 3D WebGL animation or other 2D renderers like PixiJS.

In general I’d recommended first trying to solve simpler animations with CSS or the Web Animations API, before going for a JavaScript library.

However, if you need to create very animation-heavy websites, animation tools like GSAP can be very useful, since you get amazing, performant, cross-browser consistent results in a short amount of time. It’s not a tiny library, though, so consider beforehand if the code overhead is worth adding to your project.

Whether you work as a web developer, programmer, designer or outside of the tech realm altogether, you’ve likely run into a problem that you feel could use some creative problem solving.

These problems may come in the form of writer’s block, sorting through the same tired approaches over and over, or coming up against a design problem that feels trickier than usual. Regardless of the problem at hand, there are some methods you can use to bust through a troublesome matter.

One method is visual thinking, which can inspire you to think in unique ways to break free of your rut. Here’s a guide to visual thinking to get you started and spark your creativity:

What is visual thinking?

Often spoken of, rarely defined, visual thinking is a powerful problem-solving tool that inspires new ways of thinking. Broadly speaking, visual thinking is a different way to approach a problem or task that requires individuals to adjust the way they think by working with images.

For those who think in a more linear fashion, or those who interact with words and numbers more frequently than graphics or images, it can be helpful to engage your brain in a different way of thinking – that is, by thinking of tasks or concepts in visuals rather than lists or in spreadsheets.

When should you use visual thinking?

There’s no wrong time to use visual thinking. You can take a moment in the middle of the day to draw on a piece of paper or to quickly sketch out a plan of action for nearly any problem. Visual thinking is essentially a different way to think that engages your brain in different ways, so there’s no wrong time to deploy it, and no wrong way to think and rework ideas during the development stage.

Jony Ive, chief design officer of Apple, is no stranger to thinking differently to advance a company and products using visuals. Ive once said, “There’s no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.”

Don’t look at visual thinking as added time to your day. Instead, consider it a process that can help unstick your brain when you’re feeling frustrated or bogged down at work.

What are some types of visual thinking?

You don’t have to be an artist to use visual thinking, and any type of thinker can utilise creative problem-solving approaches. That includes those who like to organise their thoughts in more concrete ways, as there are plenty of ways to keep those organisational priorities while still allowing yourself to try something new. Here are a few different visual thinking methods:

Storyboarding

Storyboarding isn’t just for those in film and television, and you don’t have to have specific materials to try out this visual thinking method. In fact, all you need is a few sticky notes and some wall space. Take the task at hand—managing a finicky client, trying to create a story for a brand or website—and break it down into individual steps or ideas. Then take those steps, jot them down on sticky notes, and arrange them in whichever order you choose—a grid, a line from left to right, in a staircase pattern or whatever feels right at the time.

Say you need to develop a new social media plan for a company, bringing together text, graphics and videos. Each of these mediums require fulfilling different needs, but must also fit into a cohesive branding approach. Take some sticky notes, map out the project and let the ideas flow. You can use a desktop or table, but there’s something about seeing and planning on a wall that helps visual thinking. You can take a step back to quite literally see the plan from a wider angle. It’s also more inviting to collaboration and is physically more accessible for groups to contribute. Scribble on some sticky notes, add, remove, rearrange, and feel the ideas begin to percolate.

Flowcharts

When you need to link together the beginning and end of a story or task, flowcharts can help you get there in a more cohesive and exciting way. You can create a flowchart in a variety of ways—on a whiteboard, in a computer programme, or simply on a piece of notebook paper.

Don’t worry about keeping it clean—visual thinking is meant to be more flexible than linear thinking, and as a result is often a bit messier. This method can be used as freely as you like on a variety of topics, whether that includes ways to bring in more customers, increasing productivity, how to promote employee engagement or streamline customer payments.

Sketching

Break out a pen or pencil and get to sketching. Doodling and sketching have been shown to increase cognitive abilities, ranging from an improvement in idea generation to the ability to recall tedious information. Luckily for those who never excelled in art class, those same studies show the quality of drawing doesn’t matter when it comes to the benefits of doodling.

Sketch out ideas, whether those include drawings of products or processes, and feel free to use colour. You can also include important words and phrases, or simply words that come to mind during brainstorming and make them more colourful by using coloured pencils, markers or by using highlighters to make words pop on the page.

Heart Internet prides itself on its 24/7 customer support, where tickets will be answered no matter what time of day it is, no matter what day it is.

That includes Christmas Day. While you’re around the table, enjoying turkey and trimmings, listening to Mariah Carey for the hundredth time, our stalwart Customer Services team is in the office, ready to answer any questions you have, solve any problems that emerge, and spend their Christmas at work.

We talked to the team that will be working over Christmas, and found out how much fun it is to spend the holidays in the office.

What’s it like working support during the holidays?

Most of us enjoy the quiet and make good use of it, working together on projects and learning new things. Since the web is constantly changing, it really gives us a chance to catch up on the developments out there and pick up new skills.

Do you do anything special in the office?

We have a Secret Santa gift exchange, and there are Christmas snacks always available. The office also has Christmas-themed fun, like Christmas Jumper Day and advent calendars.

What sort of problems come up during Christmas?

The few requests we tend to see are often for people who are running their businesses as usual, especially online stores. Plus, there’s always a request or two for setting up services on new devices!

Not to mention someone inevitably putting on Christmas music and singing along.

When you’re running a business, at the helm of a marketing department or tasked with redesigning a website, brand development is crucial. It’s not just about making a site look good and work smoothly—it’s just as important to develop a consistent brand for you and your clients. Consistent branding brings marketing to a higher level, lending a cohesion to company operations. When your branding is consistent, clients and customers will be able to spot your brand in an instant, an important factor in driving lead generation.

Brand consistency works to bring in more revenue by increasing brand awareness. But how do you develop consistent branding for your business and your clients? Focus on these marketing elements to achieve brand consistency:

Examine the mission statement

What does your company want to achieve? Every company starts off with a mission statement (we hope), so start there. Look at a company’s mission statement on both micro and macro levels, considering what a company aims to do in addition to turning a profit.

Perhaps you strive to bring communities together through developing technology, or are dedicated to providing the ultimate in customer service through a shopping experience. The mission statement is already in place—it should serve as the core of how a business not only operates, but presents itself to the world. That’s how branding develops, so ask yourself, how do you want your company to present itself to the world? Work on branding from there.

Keep a consistent tone

Tone and voice are central to branding. For example, a medical sales or industrial manufacturing company may take a more technical and formal approach to branding, as their goal may be to inspire trust in their brand. By using a more formal tone in their web copy and written content, these brands can convey that they’re operating at a high level of expertise and take their work with the utmost seriousness.

On the other hand, a consumer-facing app geared towards a younger audience may strive to promote a sense of camaraderie and fun. These companies can use a more relaxed tone, expressing a sense of fun and levity that encourages users to come back to their brand time and again.

Consider how you want customers or clients to relate to your brand, and focus on developing a unique tone and voice.

Bring together tone and design

Once you’ve decided on the tone you’ll be using in marketing campaigns and throughout company operations, it’s time to bring that tone together with design elements. The most obvious place to start is on your website. If you’re going for a more casual, friendly tone, consider use of colour and font to reflect that. These types of brands may want to use brighter colours, animations and snappy copy.

When selecting photos for your website, again consider your audience—if you’re marketing to young adults, use pictures of that demographic. If your company caters to seniors and their families, photos of families would be more appropriate.

To achieve not just consistent branding, but branding that brings in more customers, think from both a design perspective and from the perspective of the customer base.

Ultimately, brand consistency works to increase brand awareness. The logo, web design, product packaging and web content should feel visually cohesive, acting as another way to streamline tone and a company’s outlook on business.

Spark up social media campaigns

Hashtags, Facebook groups, Instagram posts and tweets—is your company engaging with all of these social media elements? If so, does your social campaign feel cohesive? When working within the realm of social media, it’s important to develop branding that can catch someone’s eye quickly as they scroll by. Social media users see countless ads each day, not to mention posts from family, friends and influencers.

Most people will scroll by, perhaps catching a pop of colour or a logo as they race to the next post. But if they stop to glance at one post, then another a few days later, before long they’ll come to associate certain colour schemes, fonts, logos and other elements with your company.

Engaging with the public over social media is an important part of any marketing campaign. Increase the rate of these engagements by increasing brand recognition by way of brand consistency.

Develop a style guide

Centralise your branding campaign by creating a style guide. Make the style guide reflect your branding efforts by integrating company colours, logos and language you want designers, writers, and salespeople to use.

Include specific guidelines on how to present your company to the broader public, how social media managers should promote new products and the tone each blog post, line of web copy or video should use, whether that’s serious, fun, or as an expert voice in the field.

Give out these guides to your employees and reference them often. As your organisation develops, keep this document up to date and make changes as necessary.

Get the whole team on board

Consistent branding isn’t just for those in the marketing department. If you’re going to achieve brand consistency, you’ll have to engage with all of your employees to get them on board. This will of course include web developers and graphic designers tasked with creating a logo, but also will involve account managers and salespeople.

One easy way to streamline brand consistency is to include branding in company emails. Make sure everyone’s email signature includes your brand’s logo and name, and that all emails are written in the same font.

The importance of consistent branding can’t be overstated. Once you examine your company’s goals and mission statement and work to bring together tone and design, you may find it easier to keep your marketing campaigns focused, streamlined and, of course, on brand.

If your site or client sites are running PHP 5.x, we urge you to upgrade to the latest version of PHP as soon as possible to ensure continued security and avoid being compromised.

Read on to find out why upgrading your PHP to the more recent version is a necessary next step to take and what’s available on Heart Internet.

Upgrading your PHP is a good thing

PHP 7 brought significant improvements in performance and security over previous versions. Here are some of the key improvements that everyone is talking about:

It’s blazingly fast

The developers worked hard to refactor the PHP codebase so they could optimise memory usage and increase performance. And they certainly succeeded.

PHP 7 is a much leaner and more efficient language, one of the reasons being that it runs with the new Zend engine, which offers much faster processing.

How much faster? When PHP 7 runs on WordPress 4.1.1, it can execute twice as many requests per second as the same platform running PHP 5.6. So, by using PHP 7 not only your code will be executed faster but you will also need fewer servers to serve the same amount of users.

This will help sites in two major ways: usability and search engine optimisation. As you know, good usability keeps visitors on the site longer, which can help boost conversion rates. Also, being that site speed is a ranking factor for search engines, a fast-loading site can rank higher and earn greater traffic.

However, if you want to improve performance and security, we strongly recommend that you make the move to the latest version of PHP as soon as possible after appropriate testing. This means making sure that your site or client sites can work with the most recent version of PHP. Also, don’t forget to upgrade whatever software you’re using, too.

What’s available on Heart Internet

Time has come to sunset the older and insecure versions of PHP. That’s why we’re retiring PHP 5.2 at Heart Internet.

Every new technology is built on the shoulders of what has come before. Web development has borrowed ideas and metaphors from architecture, from pattern languages to responsive design. In this talk, Jeremy will guide you through some of the influential ideas that have come from architecture, and how you can create beautiful structures that work with the web.

We used to work in separate teams, siloed off to focus on your own thing. Now we’re encouraged to work cross-functionally, building everything together, but it can be difficult to transfer to this way of thinking. Jessica will get into examples of where it worked, why it did, and why you should care about cross-functionality and the benefits.

There are a wide range of tools, systems, and processes we have access to as a modern-day developer or designer, but while the shiny new things are exciting, people really connect with universalities. Brendan will go through the processes and techniques he uses to create objects born from universalities, from happiness, joy, optimism, and other illogical traits.

As designers and developers, we think we know exactly what needs to be done. We map user journeys, we know what actions we want them to take, we create roadmaps, we have this. But do we really know what people need? Helen will talk about who our users are, digital exclusion, and how we can create products that work for everyone – not just those that are the most visible or easiest to design for.

Automation and industrialisation are reshaping our world. Our industry is facing a mass of ethical, moral, and political crises. When you’re in the middle of it, it can seem overwhelming. Every day, our work is changing, and Ethan asks – what do we want that change to be? What kind of work do we want to do? And what are the challenges we’re facing?